The confidence gap between men and women is well documented. But it is also clear that a lack of confidence does not necessarily equate to a lack of competence (or the other way around.) So the challenge for workplaces is to enable people without natural swagger to be heard and get promoted.

At Kleiner Perkins, one solution was to give Ellen Pao, the former junior partner who is suing the firm, coaching to improve her speaking skills to participate in the firm’s “interrupt-driven” environment. Testimony is continuing in Ms. Pao’s lawsuit, and the jury hasn’t yet been given the case to decide whether Kleiner Perkins is liable.

But the interruption coaching raises an interesting question. Is it the employees’ responsibility to learn how to interrupt, or is it the employers’ job to create a culture in which people without the loudest voice or most aggressive manner can still be heard?

“On the one hand, we need to lean in and be more confident and put ourselves out there, and there is more hesitance to do that for women than men,” said Joyce Ehrlinger, a psychology professor at Washington State University and an author of the study that found that women underestimated their performance on the science exam.

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Ellen Pao outside the court in San Francisco where her lawsuit against her former employer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is being heard.CreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images

“But there’s this issue of how women are perceived,” she said. “We don’t put ourselves out there because we know it’s not going to be accepted in the same way.”

It is “the double bind of speaking while female,” as Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook executive and “Lean In” author, and Adam Grant, a professor at the Wharton School, recently wrote in The New York Times.

People who coach executives on public speaking in Silicon Valley said interruption training was not common, but they said that to reach positions of power in the tech industry, people need to be able to aggressively speak in meetings. Coaching often includes work on how to effectively communicate in meetings and is sometimes described as assertiveness training. Kleiner has said it provided Ms. Pao with coaching so she could learn to “own the room.”

Venture capitalists describe typical partner meetings as full of verbal intimidation where the people who speak most confidently are the ones who succeed. Some women in the industry said that training such as Ms. Pao received would be helpful in that environment.

The confidence gap begins very early, Ms. Ehrlinger said, when parents overestimate the crawling ability of boys and underestimate that of girls, for example. It can be reinforced at work, where women are paid less than men and evaluated in more negative terms.

Some employers have figured out ways to address it, other than teaching women to interrupt. The show runner for “The Shield” banned interrupting during pitches by writers, Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Grant reported.

At Google, senior women began hosting workshops to encourage and prepare women to nominate themselves for promotion.

Women are often more comfortable asserting themselves when they talk about ideas in terms of a group, Ms. Ehrlinger said – describing a plan that has been vetted by multiple people or explaining how it would benefit the whole company, not just their own careers.

Still, in an age when the No. 1 piece of career advice is to build one’s personal brand, that is not necessarily a clear path to success, either.